Qiagen’s accelerates NGS innovations for precision medicine

Qiagen N.V. entered into a partnership with Freenome, a leading artificial intelligence (AI) genomics company, to accelerate the development and commercialization of next-generation sequencing (NGS) tests to enable precision medicine in cancer treatment. The alliance is part of internal initiatives and partnerships that Qiagen is creating to reach patients more quickly with NGS tests, in line with the recent modernization of the USFDA’s regulatory approach. Qiagen is partnering with Freenome to accelerate companion diagnostics development in immuno-oncology by pairing industry-leading AI with Qiagen’s Sample to Insight solutions. Qiagen and Freenome will co-market the two partners’ solutions to provide pharmaceutical companies with access to machine learning insights from a broad range of biological signals, augmenting in-house bioinformatics and Qiagen solutions. The collaboration is addressing the need for faster, more accurate and sophisticated molecular diagnostic tests that predict whether a patient will benefit from immuno-oncology therapies.

Freenome’s AI genomics platform enables sequencing and analysis of multiple analytes to evaluate genomic, proteomic, and epigenetic changes. Additionally, the platform integrates complex datasets from those changes to develop clinically actionable recommendations, such as prediction of response to oncology therapies. These solutions complement Qiagen’s industry-leading bioinformatics platforms, as well as the GeneReader NGS System and universal solutions for next-generation sequencing (NGS). This partnership can open the way to new targets in precision oncology and improve therapeutic decision-making, such as with the development of novel technologies for treatment selection. For example, the two companies will collaborate on Qiagen’s next-generation tumor mutational burden (TMB) assay, determining the level of TMB from a cancer patient’s blood. Qiagen and Freenome have integral technologies to deliver a TMB result from a blood sample and address the fact that tumor DNA is present at very low levels within the blood.